Earlier this month, Drobe published an article on the launch of CodeCraft 3. Here David Schalig of Icebird explains the origin of the Codecraft and the what we can expect this year.

Earlier this month, coding group Icebird announced themselves as organisers of this year's Codecraft, a demo coding competition for RISC OS computers. It's still early days yet, you have until the 30th of April to get your entries in. There are several catagories, ranging from the useful to musical, although with a common theme that small is beautiful. Depending on the demo catagory, you must restrict yourself to a final file size of either 1024 or 4096 bytes. It's not much, considering this article already exceeds that file size, though you will be surprised by what some people can squeeze into that.

Drobe will follow the coding competition through to April and the results thereafter. To kick this off, we spoke to organiser David Schalig (aka mrh of Icebird), about what he will expect from this year's entrants as well as coder Michael Kübel, who incidentally wrote this year's customary invitation to Codecraft #3.

Codecraft #2, by the way, was organised by Pervect of coding group Topix.
"Codecraft 2 was a platform for beginners in some way. Pervect watched through the sourcecode of every single entry, gave advices and answered questions", recalls David. Codecraft 3 is intended for all round coders, the emphasis on music has been highlighted by the 4kb music catagory.
"Codecraft #1 was held by baah of ARM'sTech", continues David. "It was based on the 1k coding competition we organized in 1996 in the Coder's Revenge diskmagazine. This original competition in 96 had a very cool atmosphere, all participants were more or less famous people from the acorn "demo scene". But since then Codecraft developed into a competition open for everyone. The aspect of programming the thing became more important than the atmosphere of the compo's background.
"ArmOric and baah of ARM'sTech will produce some entries which can be expected to be very sophisticated. Also Topix, VOTI and Kulture are likely to produce something. Last but not least Icebird will enter some entries - probably 'out of competition' as we organize the thing."

Icebird plans to hold another Yelling Jam Party, to coincide with the demo event. The first Yelling Jam was held in 1996 in Bremen, Germany and is a popular party for coders and demo designers. Icebird expect people mainly from the Atari, Amiga and the RISC OS scene, so it is open to just about everyone.

Michael Kübel has written this year's invitation to the competition. Demo invitations are usually short intros aimed at getting other coders interested and also marks the start of a competition. Michael is a keen ARM coder, various audio visualization programs/plug ins for Andre Timmermans Digital CD were written by him.

"I really like these kinds of competiton, because when you limit yourself (Acorn Risc PC, StrongARM as the 'speed' limit and 1 KByte for the size limit) you get much more creative", Michael explains.
The intro 'BiLiZo' was initially written to be a sound to vision effect, like many of his other programs. As the Codecraft launch loomed, Michael stepped in to provide his psychodelic invitation, a screenshot of which is given above.
According to Michael, BiLiZo works by..

Set up 2 offscreen buffers

Create 2 fullscreen text bitmaps with the antialiased font

Calculate a nice colour palette

Depending on the part of the demo (Text 1/Lines 1/Text 2/Lines 2) combine the text bitmap or the lines with the offscreen buffer

Zoom a circular displaced fraction of this offscreen buffer to fullscreen with the use of a bilinear filter algortihm.

Plot the offscreen buffer on the screen and switch the buffers to get the feedback effect

Jump back to 4

"The whole thing started to get real when I got the knowledge of this bilinear filtering and how it's done from a nice internet site about coding (www.flipcode.com)...it's the same algorithm like they use in new 3D graphic cards to smooth textures. So I transformed and optimized it to ARM assembler and thought what to do with it and it finally got a zoomer, because 'normal' zooming could never look that smooth."

Please login before posting a comment. Use the form on the right to do so or create a free account.

Search the archives

Today's featured article

The new apple of my eyeWould you swap your dusty Acorn for a polished Apple computer? Martin Hansen has been checking out the world of Steve Jobs and his range of shiny kit.15 comments, latest by adh1003 on 6/1/09 1:06PM. Published: 17 Nov 2008